미국 르네쌍스와 미국문학의 미국성.pdf

The History of American Literature, 2022

University Chouaib Doukkali Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences

Careful survey of literature of a wide variety by authors significantly associated with the United States of America provides an interesting means of appreciating common characteristics of the American peoples. This handout serves as stimuli for such a discussion, and is, by no means, comprehensive. May it stimulate further thinking on what characterizes the literature of a people, particularly the people of the United States.

Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism, 2008

2018

Students enrolled in the course will be asked to think critically about what constitutes an American literary tradition, and how the texts under discussion travel across space and time to form conversations that are not easily delineated along the contours of race, language, gender, and nationality. As such we will begin our study by thinking, first, of the development of American exceptionalism and its relation to the origins of early American studies. From here we will continue our journey, often by reading either canonical texts in new contexts, or introducing new texts into the course conversation. Students will be introduced to some scholarly and critical literature in the field and will be asked to develop their skills in reading, summarizing, and critiquing such modes of criticism. Students will also develop their literary-historical research skills through a short research paper that looks at reception history across space and time. In doing so, we will continue to press beyond typical barriers that earlier survey courses might have presented, asking us to find ways of moving past the nationalist boundaries of what constitute “Americanness” and begin to rethink what we might call “early American literature.”

The richest period in American literary history, the American Renaissance (1830-1865) produced Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson. These authors were strongly influenced by foreign literature, from the ancients to the Romantics. This transnational influence mingled with the styles and idioms of an emerging popular culture that was distinctively American, divided between conventional, sentimental-domestic writings and sensational or grotesquely humorous ones. Integrating themes and images from this variegated popular culture, the major authors also projected in their works the paradoxes of a nation that promoted both individualism and union, that touted freedom but tolerated chattel slavery, that preached equality but witnessed widening class divisions and the oppression of women, blacks, and Native Americans. These oppressed groups produced a literary corpus of their own that was once neglected but that has assumed a significant place in the American canon.

How literature is affected and connected to circumstances.